Pru Goes Troppo

By Stevan Eldred-Grigg

Pru has been married to Guy for a quarter of a century. She hasn’t had sex for ten years. ‘Why the hell do I live my life this way?’ she says to herself. ‘I mean – really!’ Change comes from out of the blue when odd old Uncle Bertie dies in Samoa and leaves his property to Guy. On a whim, the couple decide to go and take a look at what they know must be a tropical paradise. Not their usual stamping ground, you understand. Daringly, they fly to Apia.
Pru soon finds herself thinking things, feeling things, doing things she’s never till now come close to thinking, feeling, doing.
‘Are we just an ornamental waste of space, d’you think?’ she asks Guy one day in Samoa.
‘I rather think we are, darling.’
‘Oh dear.’
Pru Goes Troppo is a comic novel about the ups and downs of a wealthy married couple who are privileged parasites, yet curiously innocent.

‘Eldred-Grigg has a sharp eye for social mores and the habits of love and family. A super story about rashly setting off on a mid-life adventure in a totally new culture. For Pru and Guy, things might never be the same again.’ Tina Shaw.

‘Unexamined prejudice and inert desires are overturned and enlivened when a snobbish aristocratic Cantabrian couple undertake a journey of discovery in Samoa. An exploration of self-repression and new beginnings, meticulously described. Frequently funny and very human.’ Kerry Donovan Brown

• Language: English
• Publisher: Piwaiwaka Press
• Release date: Oct 5, 2020
• ISBN: 9780473538767

Stevan Eldred-Grigg

Stevan Eldred-Grigg is an award-winning novelist and historian. He grew up in a big tumultuous household on the West Coast and in Canterbury before graduating with a doctorate in history from the Australian National University. He has lived in Blackball, Christchurch, Canberra, Whangarei, Wellington, Hamilton, Iowa City, Berlin, Mexico City, Shanghai, Singapore, Waiuku and Beijing. He now lives once more in Canterbury.Oracles and Miracles, a runaway bestseller, became the first major novel by a living New Zealand writer to be published in China. Shanghai Boy, published in 2006, explores a tortuous love affair between a New Zealander and a Chinese young man in the immense city of Shanghai. ‘Age, no problem! Gender, no problem. Constellation, no problem. Body, sex, race, all no fucking problem. Feeling, you know! Feeling! That is everything.’ Other novels include The Siren Celia, Gardens of Fire, Blue Blood and Kaput!Stevan Eldred-Grigg is also well known for his history books. Phoney Wars, published in 2017, probes social life in New Zealand during the murderous years of the Second World War. The book also asks whether there was any need for the country to go to war anyway. Phoney Wars is the companion volume to The Great Wrong War, which deals with New Zealand in the First World War. The sincerity and the malice, the stubbornness and the yearnings of warring New Zealanders are central to both books. Quick, vivid, democratic and questioning, the two war histories have polarised readers. ‘We have been put on trial and found wanting,’ says one reviewer. ‘Eldred-Grigg would have us believe that Germany bore virtually no responsibility,’ says another. Angry readers have gone so far as to claim that the book is a disloyal attack on the people of New Zealand. Other history books by the author include: White Ghosts, Yellow Peril, a history of New Zealand and China from 1790 to 1950; People, People, People, a very short history of New Zealand; Diggers, Hatters and Whores, a history of the gold rushes in colonial New Zealand.David Hill, novelist, New Zealand: ‘Stevan Eldred-Grigg defies classification. He can swoop from the historical to the contemporary, from lyric to polemic, from fiction to faction. He’s unsettling as well as absorbing’.Xiang Wei, literary critic, Shanghai: ‘Stevan writes with beautiful simplicity. His narrative is down to earth, yet often funny and witty.’Robert Jones, editor, New York: ‘Stevan Eldred-Grigg is a wonderful writer.’

Book preview

PRU GOES TROPPO

Stevan Eldred-Grigg

https://eldred-grigg.weebly.com/

Piwaiwaka Press

copyright 2020 Stevan Eldred-Grigg

ISBN 978-0-473-53876-7

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PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

‘The sweeping gravel driveway curving, um, beautifully through the autumnal woodlands of, um, the serene autumnal woodlands of the Beauchamp Estate,’ I’m dictating into my phone while swinging the wheel of my wee car, ‘make you think you’ve been beamed back two hundred years to the days of Jane Austen.’

I’m laying it on with a trowel because it’s my job.

What do I really want to say?

Money, that’s what I want to say. Loot. Old loot. Lots of old loot. Pissloads of ancestral pelf slithering down the generations and buying by the swag the skills of architects, builders, landscapers, gardeners, housekeepers, grooms – and, right now, one loser of a journo.

‘Baaaa,’ says some sheep somewhere.

‘Emma Woodhouse or Elizabeth Bennet would love to wander, um, stroll – saunter? – into this lovely long house of creamy stone with classic proportions – um, neoclassical proportions – ’

A lady in jeans and a cashmere sweater steps out into a colonnaded portico. Must have heard the hissing of gravel under the wheels of my little Nissan. The lady’s not tall. A bit plump. Nice tits. Her hair is in a bob, ash blonde. She’s fifty or so, according to our files back at the mag.

My age, in other words.

Not a good age.

‘A parterre, formal yet welcoming, um, inviting, with clusters of terracotta urns and a reflecting pond, and behind the parterre another autumnal expanse of, er, sylvan woodlands.’

What else would woodlands be but sylvan, you might ask. I’m fighting against my nerves when I come to these sorts of places. These sorts of places aren’t the sorts of places you expect to find people like me. You know, people who don’t have old money. People who don’t have new money. People who don’t have any sort of money except not enough money. People with the wrong whakapapa. I don’t fit in. I won’t fit in. I stick out like some numb dumb sore thumb and the stocky little lady on the portico – quite pretty, actually – she knows, and – and, well, I’ve got to watch myself not to say something waspish.

Why did I suggest to the editor that we do this series of spreads?

New Old Landed Estates of Canterbury, that’s what we’re calling the spreads. The angle is new country houses that people a century or so from now will see as part of the province’s heritage of stately homes, sort of thing. Our photographer will come another day. The mag is glossy and sells mostly to women in the suburbs. Women who’ve got a few spare bucks. A few, but not a lot of, spare bucks. Women, poor saps, who’ll max out the credit card to buy what the ads in the mag are hyping, trying to kid themselves that by buying they’re inching a notch or two upwards –

Women trying to kid themselves they can copy this lady in the cashmere and the ash blonde bob.

Our readers know next to nothing about these people and their aloof way of doing things. A lot never even knew the snoots existed till we started the spreads. Our covert editorial angle, below the sugary sweetness of the surface sycophancy, is political. We’re hoping to give a few readers a bit of a wake up, make them ask themselves why some people are so loaded when most are loadless. You know, raise political consciousness.

A revolution on the way, comrades!

Right, well worth a try – or at least kidding ourselves it’s worth a try – and what the hell, it’s a job, and these days jobs in journalism, thanks to the internet –

‘Hi,’ she says, stepping forward, holding out her right hand as I stumble towards her after bumbling out of the Nissan. ‘You must be Wayne.’

‘Dwayne,’ I mumble. ‘Mrs Blandwood?’

‘Pru,’ she says, giving my prole paw a good dry shake.

‘Sure, er, Pru,’ says me, grimacing, twisting my face into a professional smile, also part of my job. I catch her giving a quick glance down at my legs. Hah! My gears are totally wrong for this sort of outing. Black. Cheap. Cheap gears are what I like, they let me kid myself I’m sticking to my guns, staying true to who I am, what I am – whatever that is – which is sort of cool because I know that seen through her eyes I’m just some sad try-hard staring down the gun at late middle age yet kidding himself he can sport the new emo look and wear his black hair long and swept across his eyes, and cram his legs and bum into tight black jeans, jeans that are tight as – they’re the latest look, they call them skinny.

Mrs Blandwood – oops, Pru – is smiling, a smile as professional as mine, since while my profession is journo her profession is lady bountiful.

Or is her smile – something else? The glance – the look she shot down at my tight pants.

Fuck! The squiress was checking out my tackle!

Or was she?

I peek at her face, the skin of which is a soft pink, very soft. A quiet little string of pearls around her neck. A quiet little pearl in the lobe of each ear. She keeps smiling, though the smile’s only on the lips, not in the eyes.

‘Shall we go this way?’ she says.

The mansion, when we get inside, is just what you expect. Fucking gorgeous! Not that I can say that in the mag. The mag wants anodyne words. Gracious. Spacious. Quietly echoing. Antiques. Luxury.

Class.

A woman who seems to be some sort of servant gives a nod. A man who seems to be some sort of servant brings in an armful of firewood. Blue gum. Big fragrant hunks. Pru shows me both storeys and tells me the story. Beauchamp began as a sheep station yonks ago but, like a lot of others, dwindled away during the twentieth century. One night between the wars the big old house got burnt to the ground. The gardens got ploughed up. Pru and Guy Blandwood bought the place when it was just a patch of pine plantations and sheep paddocks. The first thing they did was get some workmen to lay out new grounds. Afterwards they got this house designed by Giles Morrin.

A dining room. A morning room. A music room.

‘Guy had a law degree but it wasn’t for him, the law,’ murmurs Pru. ‘And I had my degree in art history. We made up our minds to go on to the land. And this scrap of land came onto the market. West Canterbury is very much our stamping ground, and has been for our families since the year dot, so it all seemed to fall into place pretty nicely. We took it on and we’ve done our best to make our little bit of a mark.’

A library.

‘Gorgeous,’ I say, stopping at a double doorway to drool over its Palladian proportions – a perfect double cube. All four walls stacked with beautiful books. A twin set of french windows opening onto a courtyard. A twin set of leather sofas, oxblood red. A loo table, mahogany. Atop the loo table, an antique globe. The globe whirrs on its brass spindle when touched by me gingerly.

‘Not very useful,’ says my hostess. ‘It’s early Victorian.’

‘The loo table?’

‘The globe.’

Other rooms follow.

Gold. Silver. Silk. Tapestry.

‘Gorgeous,’ I say again. ‘The whole house is gorgeous.’

‘Well it’s our home, and we hope it’ll become the home of our grandchildren one day. Guy will show you the woodlands. Now, while we’re waiting for him why don’t we get out into the fresh air and take a little trot down the poplar avenue?’

So a little trot is what we take.

White flagstones between two towering rows of flaring yellow. One tall straight Lombardy after another tall straight Lombardy after another tall straight Lombardy. An easterly ruffles our hair and stirs the yellow leaves. Pru, clearly reckoning that she’s done her bit, has gone quiet. Screwing up her pale grey eyes, she stares at a deer paddock. Is the ball now in my court? What can I say next?

Something pastoral.

‘Good season, like?’ I blather, not knowing the right words but supposing we must be at the start or the end or in the middle of some sort of season in her rural calendar. ‘Like – so far?’

She gives me a short look, brisk and businesslike.

‘Middling. Fairly good grass growth till a fortnight ago.’

‘Weather behaving itself?’

I sound like my own granddad, poking about in his tiny backyard in the city.

‘A few first frosts. Good enough ground moisture on the whole. Our stockman’s happy.’

Her walking brogues, handmade, clearly bespoke, scuff through yellow drifts of leaf fall. Yellow leaves, golden paddocks. Above everything, the deep blue sky – deep blue, yet blank – of May. All of a sudden I feel aroused. I want it! The world of these people is like porn. You can easily get off on how fucking fabulous their lives are, how everything they’ve got is uber quality, how lucky they are, how privileged they are – how they’ve got everything, the lot!

‘Awesome lookout, isn’t it?’ I say.

‘Yes, it is rather pretty. We’re quite lucky.’

A few of the deer lift soft skittish heads from the grass and look at us, some shying away. Poor things. Fenced in. Like me. Not like Pru.

I point to the haha that runs along both sides of the avenue.

‘Digging this out must have been a lot of work! Why is it so deep and wide?’

‘Well, the deer, you know. They’re jumpers, Wayne.’

Not me. I’m no jumper. I’m a stumper.

‘Did you start off with a vision for the whole garden, Pru?’

‘Certainly. We wanted a Regency sort of look, but not forced, not like some gardens you see these days, where everything’s been overdone. You know what I mean? Done too well.’

Sure, of course I know what she means, she means the gardens of upstarts who don’t come from an old family and don’t know there’s any such thing as an old family but just blunder about thinking that all you need to do with some of the raw millions you made with hard mahi or more likely crooked trading is talk to pricey landscape architects and point at a pic or two inside a copy of some glossy mag – like my mag – and order a garden at x thousand smackers to the square metre.

‘You both grew up in the country?’

‘Yes, that’s right.’

I know without asking. Again, our files back at the mag. Pru comes from an old landowning family. Her husband comes from an old landowning family. The two of them are cousins several times over, in fact, since the family trees in that toney old crowd are tangled together all the way up from root to canopy.

‘Cool,’ I say. ‘Wide open spaces.’

‘And narrow closed minds, I sometimes think,’ she adds, which is startling but before I can follow up she’s moved on. ‘You yourself grew up in town, Wayne?’

‘Dwayne,’ I say, maybe too fast because she looks me up and down again, very politely but a bit sort of disdainfully.

‘Sorry, Dwayne,’ she says. ‘Christchurch?’

‘Yip, that’s right. Avondale.’

‘Avondale? I can’t quite place Avondale. Anywhere near Avonhead?’

‘Other side of town from Avonhead.’

The east side of town, needless to say. Pru can hardly be expected to be clear about those suburbs over there, to the east.

‘Very nice,’ she says with admirable calmness. ‘And how long have you been with this magazine?’

‘Couple months. Not my usual line of work.’

‘Oh? What’s your usual line?’

‘Political journalism. I’ve been doing political news for a fair few years. I was the editor of a newspaper for expats in Mexico.’

‘How interesting.’

Not interesting, in other words. I know that people like her think the only interesting places are here and Europe. I grew up seeing things a bit differently. I wanted to go everywhere, look at everything, so after getting my degree I backpacked through most of Asia. After that I came back, got married, saved. And then Annette – my wife – and me wandered around West Africa. A lot to learn in West Africa. Latin America was our next goal. We wound up in Oaxaca, in Mexico, where we ran out of money and had a go at getting work. Annette’s a secondary teacher and found a job easily. I was by then a seasoned journo and found a job easily too. Annette stuck it out for a couple of years in Oaxaca. She got homesick, though. Off she flew. I stayed on. I love Mexico. Annette and me are divorced now. I loved Mexico more every year. Then the new tech started cutting into newspapers and I lost my job.

‘You chose this sort of journalism for the sake of a change, I imagine?’

‘I chose this sort of journalism for the sake of the pay.’

‘I see.’

Her voice sounds serene but clearly she thinks my coarseness quite nasty. Anyone knows it’s not on to speak so frankly about work, or lack of work, or money, or lack of money.

I could’ve stayed on in Oaxaca and looked for some other sort of work, maybe an online newssite, but it was time to get back here for a bit. Mum’s on the way out. Her heart’s dicky. Dad’s already gone west. So I’m back in my boyhood bedroom in the same brick bungalow they brought us kids up in – three bedrooms, a lounge and a dinette – doing my best to keep an eye out for Mum, helping when I can – she’s not the sort who’ll ask for help. My bro helps, too. And my sis.

I let out a bit of a sigh, thinking about poor old Mum.

Pru says nothing.

We get to a hexagonal pavement at the end of the avenue and stop, looking around us at the deer paddock. Centrepiece of the hexagon is an urn – a big urn – whose plinth and bowl are glazed cobalt and whose handles are a couple of terracotta cupids poking their little bare bums up at the sky.

‘Italian, is it? The urn?’

‘Good spotting. Yes, Tuscan. Not so terribly old, only the late eighteenth century. Its mate was broken so we were able to pick it up quite cheaply.’

Hah! Ceramics are big in Mexico. I’ve learnt enough interviewing plutocratic politicians and rich lobbyists over there not only to tell an Italian urn from a French urn but give a goodish guess as to the cost. You don’t get your mitts on one of these things, even without its twin, unless you can shell out two or three months of my salary.

‘Cool,’ I say.

A taciturnity she seems to quite like.

‘Shall we make our way back to the terrace, Dwayne? We can go down the yew avenue then, and find Guy.’

As we turn in our tracks, I see she’s casting a cool measuring eye over everything. The creamy limestone walls of the terraces. The autumn colours of the trees. The creamy limestone walls of the nearest wing of the house. I feel cut off, left out. I feel that these people are guarding secrets they keep hidden from people like us, people like you and me. They know things we don’t know, these people, don’t they?

They pull the strings.

We set off down the yew avenue, which runs between the deer paddock on the left and a horse paddock on the right. A brown horse comes nosing over, dangling his long limp dick. He sticks his head across the fence, shakes a bit, snorts, and seems to offer himself to Pru.

Pru, letting out a little laugh, steps across to the fence and starts stroking

Reviews for Pru Goes Troppo

[Hel Inn · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Painfully funny. The main characters are cringeworthy but still somehow likeable and the story is a real page turner.